eBay India launches its first integrated brand campaign after three years

A still from the campaign.In a category which sees marketing dollars (or rupees) being dusted up by truckloads, eBay India, the 100% subsidiary of eBay Inc., has been rather quiet for too long. After a hiatus of nearly three years, eBay recently launched its first ever full-fledged brand campaign ‘Things Don’t Judge’ that has been conceptualised by BBDO India. The TV film touches upon issues such as gender bias, religion and same sex marriage, in a bunch of situations making a point that things (bought from the site of course) do not judge the way people do.

Talking to Brand Equity, Shivani Suri, director marketing, eBay India, said, the timing of the campaign is right because of the changing marketplace that has been seeing a normalization curve, post the DIPP (Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion) announcement with its implications on the pricing and the discounting structure, thus hopefully bringing a normalcy to the market.

In her view, this throws open the market for the consumer not just on pricing but larger reasons for the category. The other point that the campaign makes is about offering more than the 10 crore products on the site. “Last year we were busy driving our assortment strength and are now fully ready to back the claim of over 10 crore products on the site. Today nobody can match that assortment," asserts Suri.

A few weeks back another e-commerce player Snapdeal had launched a mega-blitz campaign with its ‘Unbox Zindagi’ positioning. In a category that is still to mature, one may well argue, if it is early days to take this kind of stance by the players? What are the chances of it getting lost as a mumbo-jumbo of life-truths when all around in the e-commerce world is messaging about assured delivery and returns and festival sales?

Suri begs to differ and says, “While every player is talking about sales, we have taken the stance of ‘conversation leadership’ precisely to avoid getting lost in the clutter of sameness. The futuristic way of life is what we are looking at establishing with this campaign, even as our culture and the society becomes more open and more accepting.”

Watch the film here:

We asked Josy Paul, chairman, BBDO India, about the brief given to his team. This is what he had to say, “It was less of a brief and more of a briefing session. In fact, it was a roundtable discussion about creating a point of view for e-commerce. How could eBay stand for something meaningful in the life of the consumer? We felt that this was the only way to lift the brand above the everyday noise of the e-commerce category."

Along with the brand film and its shorter edits, there is a digital leg of the campaign which is created by the digital agency Tribal22feet. Through this, the brand plans to reveal 60 real-life stories of real people under the hashtag ‘Things don’t judge’.